As will be appreciated by those skilled in the art, the wireless or mobile telephone is no longer simply used for voice communications. Although voice communications remain a primary purpose for many of these communication devices, these devices are being called on to provide the same communication data exchange services demanded by the hard wired communication systems including the transmission of vast amounts of data such as provided through public and private internet connections. The mobility of the wireless units and the high data transmission rates used with these systems presents challenges to the acceptance testing of a new system or an existing system as it expands into new and previously uncovered territory.
To meet the new demands placed on wireless systems, recent developments have evolved from the original analog cellular or mobile telephones which were almost entirely limited to voice communications. Second-generation digital mobile cellular phones were also previously concerned with voice communications, but instead of using conventional analog transmissions, transmitted voice data in digital packets. Transmission by digital packets, however, readily lends itself to the transmission or exchange of vast amounts of non-voice data as well as voice data. In any event, the demands for transmitting various types of digital data has recently exploded, and the processing or packaging of non-voice digital data for transmission over wireless communication systems has developed rapidly and somewhat separately from the processing and packaging of voice data packets. In a typical communication system, the two types of data are processed separately and then merged and transmitted over both the second-generation (2G) systems and third generation (3G) systems, such as for example, CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access). It should also be noted that CDMA is used in certain 2G cellular networks like Sprint PCS and Verizon.
The rapidly increasing demands for transmitting high volume non-voice data has introduced new problems for providing coverage over new regions or areas. For example, a CDMA 3G system has the capability of transmitting large blocks of non-voice data at significantly higher bit rates depending on the system loading that exists at the time of transmission. Since the higher bit rates require significantly more power to transmit than transmitting lower bit rates, the amount of power required to accept a hand-off or include a single, additional or new mobile into the group of mobiles being serviced by an individual BTS (Base-station Transceiver Subsystems) varies dramatically. Such widely varying power demands between different mobile units makes the task of obtaining valid acceptance test data much more difficult. The method of the present invention discloses a novel method for testing newly installed or upgraded systems which provides meaningful and valuable acceptance test data to the customer.